Independent historian Rickie Solinger presents a provocative history of two-and-a-half centuries of battles over pregnancy and its consequences. A sweeping chronicle of women’s battles for reproductive freedom throughout America, Pregnancy and Power explores the many forces — social, racial, economic, and political — that have shaped women’s reproductive lives in the U.S.
(To request a review copy of this book, contact Barbara Jester by phone, fax, or email.)
In Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (320 pages/$27.95, cloth), published this month by New York University Press, independent historian Rickie Solinger presents a provocative history of two-and-a-half centuries of battles over pregnancy and its consequences. A sweeping chronicle of women’s battles for reproductive freedom throughout America, Pregnancy and Power explores the many forces — social, racial, economic, and political — that have shaped women’s reproductive lives in the U.S.
Solinger argues that a woman’s control over her body involves much more than the right to choose an abortion. Reproductive politics were at play when slaveholders devised breeding schemes, when nineteenth-century employers restricted women’s work hours, and when doctors pressed African American women to be sterilized in the 1960s. The book is filled with powerful accounts of the fights various groups of women waged in this country to control their bodies and their destinies, from colonial anti-miscegenation laws to anti-contraceptive laws, to the 1990s welfare reforms that punished poor women for having children.
This very timely discussion of some hot-button political issues reveals that a complete understanding of reproductive politics must take into account the many players shaping public policy — lawmakers, educators, employers, clergy, physicians — as well as the consequences for women who obey and who resist these policies.
Rickie Solinger’s books include Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade and Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States.